It’s hard to know what we’ll end up calling this phase of Michel Gondry’s career, but it’s certainly been unpredictable. He’s made four non-Hollywood movies since 2011’s big budget disappointment The Green Hornet, the unlikely superhero entry starring Seth Rogen. There was a guerrilla-style experiment with non-actors on a New York City bus (The We and the I), an undiluted hit of love-drenched visual whimsy (Mood Indigo) and a hand-drawn animated rap session between himself and Noam Chomsky (Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?). While each were innovative, these were peculiar and particular films. With the French-language Microbe and Gasoline, Gondry has made his most satisfying movie since his 2004 masterpiece Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Consider it an anti-Superbad. Microbe and Gasoline is a sweet, honest and rounded portrayal of male teenage friendship that favours optimism over melancholy, and while it doesn’t ignore sex, it isn’t obsessed with it. Nor is it lewd. “Love is a noble, beautiful kind of pain!” is a fairly typical exclamation from our two outsider friends. Daniel (Ange Dargent) is small for his age, and frequently mistaken for a girl. He gets annoyed by the error, but won’t cut his long hair because he considers it core to his originality. “Your personality is not connected to your haircut, but to your actions!” fires back his new best pal, a slightly older transfer student Théo (Théophile Baquet).

Théo is a blue-collar kid who tinkers with motors. The others taunt him with the nickname Gasoline, but when he’s hooked up a sound effects machine and loudspeaker to his bicycle, it’s clear to everyone that he’s someone you want to be friends with. Daniel (so small he’s called Microbe) sketches portraits and wonders why everyone else in the world isn’t preoccupied with death. He tries masturbating, but his late bloomer situation just brings frustration, made all the more awkward by his laissez-faire mother (Audrey Tautou) who encourages him to continue drawing pornography.

Daniel and Théo’s life in Versailles isn’t really filled with hardship, other than Théo’s mother being ill. But there are the indignities of being a teenager. They decide that the right thing to is build a car out of an old bed spring, and dream about hitting the road. After an embarrassing attempt to socialise at a party (“Alcohol is the death of dignity”), they get serious about their scheme. Their handmade vehicle would be too conspicuous out there in the countryside, but if they built a small house-on-wheels, maybe they could hide in plain sight? Soon the boys take their drivable shed, replete with flowers on the fake windowsill, in pursuit of adventure.

Microbe and Gasoline is craftily shot, but there’s almost almost no Gondry-esque surrealism evident in the frame. The creativity that visualised disappearing memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and sweded films in Be Kind Rewind exists, but it’s within the characters, and that’s enough of a playful spark to make the movie a true thrill. A light, at times bluegrass-tinged score from musician/composer Jean-Claude Vannier adds a rascally edge, and more than anything else, this is an enterprise in fun.

Tempers can flare and emotions can run hot as the boys suffer setbacks, but Gondry is quick to cut to them chasing each other with stinky underwear dangling from a stick.

It may be far-fetched to think there are any 14- or 15-year-olds who would prefer to use a paper map over an iPhone’s GPS, but somehow Gondry sells it. Unlike Wes Anderson, whose airtight dioramas are wonderful in their own way, Gondry’s wily style grows from the mess of real life. Somewhere in movie paradise Microbe and Gasoline are taking a trip with Enid from Ghost World to visit Harold and Maude.